The king’s orders were immediately carried out. The queen could only comply. The best teachers were chosen. Tripetus learned fencing, Latin, gymnastics, Japanese and the piano. The director of protocol came every morning to show him how to display reverence and dictate to him the pretty speeches that he had to learn by heart. After that, to complete his education, he was sent to study rhetoric for a year at Louis-le-Grand.10
Then something curious happened. Tripetus, who concealed a beautiful soul beneath his coarse exterior, gradually acquired a taste for study. He became a serious man, a lover of logic and the rigorous sciences. As the queen, unknown to the king, sent him a great deal of money, he bought books and philosophical instruments. In the meantime, it seemed that his original ugliness had disappeared. The books had made him pale; he had cut his hair and no longer made puns. So, when he had to return, cries of admiration rose up throughout the kingdom.
Coaches with large plumes emerged from the royal stables and turned majestically into the court of honor to go in search of him. All along the avenue whose paving-stones were outlined in grass, the people, dressed in their Sunday best, waved their hoods and extended their hands when the halberdiers opened the gala procession. Tripetus scarcely took the time to put on his court costume, and went to find the queen. During his absence, naturally, he had fallen in love.
He made her a very fine speech.
“This is no longer Tripetus,” said the queen. “This man talks too well. He looks like a poet, with his pale face.” Turning toward him, she said, sadly: “I’m unable to love you.”
During Tripetus’ absence, a new stable boy had been taken on at the palace. He was extremely stupid, but very robust. He was the one who accompanied the queen when she went riding in the forest.
As soon as the king saw Tripetus and heard about the queen’s reply, he went to find her. He was very angry. “Madame,” he said, “A queen must keep her promises. You have perjured yourself; therefore, you must die.”
The people were immediately summoned, by a trumpet-blast, to the terrace of the royal palace. A scaffold was set up, draped in black velvet, around which torches in the hands of sad pages reddened the night, and the queen’s head was cut off with a golden axe.
The executioner was very awkward. Never, in human memory, had a capital punishment taken place in the country. The newspapers took advantage of it to launch a violent attack on the government. The executioner’s duties ceased, from that day on, to be a sinecure. What a fine opportunity to demand their suppression on the grounds that they were unnecessary!
Tripetus missed the queen terribly. His conduct, on the day of the funeral, was above reproach. He continually raised a fine lace handkerchief to his eyes, and pronounced a few very tactful words over the grave.
Then he handed in his resignation as jester, not wanting to remain in a city that had such sad memories for him. He went to reside in a neighboring country, where he began writing his memoirs. He lived in a comfortable old house with old oak furniture and antique porcelain on the walls. In a large room whose windows overlooked a large garden, Tripetus smoked a long Dutch pipe, and sighed as he gazed at a portrait of the queen set above the fireplace, which the king had kindly given him as a souvenir.
Nightmare
For Henri de Régnier11
The day went by slowly. Heavy clouds passed over the narrow street, darkening it at intervals, and the windows that Tiburce could see opposite his own were more mysterious than ever. He was familiar with the indefinable attraction of windows, those enigmatic lights open on the existence of the thousands of phantoms who respire around us.
What a haunting, to imagine all those animate forms moving around, all the way to the horizon, behind doors, walls and streets, with cries and gestures intersecting, calling out to one another, replying to one another, making the vast Earth into a supple mantle of humanity! And every one of those forms has its interior and intimate life, like ours but also different. An almost guilty curiosity directs the eyes of an observer toward the details of interiors perceived in the vicinity. The other life marks itself out in various arrangements. The corner of an item of furniture, a painting on a wall, a lamp on a table, all have stories to tell. The vague souls of objects retain the memory of presences and frictions. A silhouette passes through the bay of a window, or behind the closed pane. Slight concerns and preoccupations reveal themselves, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes suggestive of emotion, sometimes avowing that profound resignation that is the consciousness of objects, animals and the majority of human beings. Some, just like all the rest, after a few oscillations, remain motionless in the same place, and are never astonished. The succession of the minutes is, for them, an ordinary game.
Tiburce’s mind, wandering, crossed the street and rose up as far as the balconies of the upper floors. In his imagination, he clung on to the narrow margins of balustrades, afraid of falling, with a real sensation of effort, and then of fingers losing their grip, of his body plunging to the pitiless pavement. Then, suddenly, breathing deeply, he found himself sitting in the low-ceilinged room, at ground level, with flat earth beneath his feet.
All the familiar objects, contemporaries of and witnesses to his bizarre life, seemed to be congratulating him for having escaped the danger.
It was a sensation analogous to that which one experiences in a dream, when one thinks one is falling from a height. In the dream, however, one always wakes up before hitting the ground, because, if the illusion went as far as that, the cerebral shock would be such that one would surely die. Many sudden inexplicable deaths during sleep are doubtless caused by mortal dreams that are not interrupted.
As a child, Tiburce had supposed that the uniform Earth did not extend limitlessly, and that one would arrive, somewhere, at the edge of the world. The concept if an immense globe, whose center was down and its entire circumference up did not enter his head, any more than it occurs to any being who is naïve, either by virtue of age of lack of culture. Cosmologies must still exist corresponding to that state of mind. Savage humans believe that the world is a vast round surface bounded by a circular ocean or the void. That is the science of Homer. Why not? We smile at these primitive concepts, but either progress is only a vain word—and which of our scientists would accept that hypothesis?—or they have to admit that, one day, their explanation of the universe, such as they understand it today, will seem as ingenuous and false as that of Ptolemy or the Hindus. Genuine discoveries inevitable transform other verities into errors and infantilize them. All forms disappear in their turn.
But this is the present form. In space, there is neither up nor down. Otherwise, what a fall at the edge of the world! We would be like Victor Hugo’s Satan, eternally falling from the sky.12 On the contrary, for anyone who knows the laws of attraction, is it not amusing to imagine, an undeniable fact, that the approach of a more voluminous star, emerging from the depths of the abyss at our zenith, might overturn natural laws, and the Earth, without having moved, might suddenly find itself up, with its streets upside-down and its roofs hanging down.
There are people who are carried away at birth by a fairy—perhaps wicked, but whose smile is persuasive—to be imprisoned in a palace of enchantments. What a mortal rose is thought! And what torments those whom its perfume intoxicates undergo! Their sentimentality, like their reflection, is exasperated by excessively numerous and overly various impacts. That astonishment of life, like a new wine, lasts for many years, sometimes a lifetime. And their intelligence is nothing but a flickering flame shielded from the wind in the hollow of the hand, which does not prevent them from bumping into a wall every three paces.
For there is no durable route. Every idea that one follows to its end arrives at absurdity and annihilation. Happy are the philosophers who suppose that problems are resolved by the declaration that there are no problems! Happier still are those who blithely accept antinomies with a light heart, and rejoice in the fact that one can affirm the opposite of everything—which proves th
at truths are numerous—and work tirelessly to construct the temple of their ignorance, sustained by columns that are alternately black and white, taking great hope from that diversity of color for the solidity of the edifice! Even happier, finally, are those who renounce inventing theories, and accommodate themselves to live in some appearance of truth that the crowd passes from hand to hand, like false coins whose circulation is hurried. It is necessary to accept life without interrogating it, and avoiding thought with jealous concern. Besides, what evidence is there that thought is not a disease of matter—like a pearl, in spite of its beauty?
Life can only subsist by grace of insouciance. It’s a sort of conspiracy. The human race is like a traveler marching alongside a gulf into which he is forbidden to direct his eyes, on pain of being attracted by the depths. No more can he raise his gaze toward the starry sky above his head, for the slightest false step would be fatal. Pascal lived in that terror, equally anguished on the side of a bridge over the Seine and the brink of mathematical infinity. Thoughts, like gestures, refuse to lean over the edge of the top of the tower.
No one was more vulnerable to vertigo than Tiburce. It is one of those impressions to whose experience everyone is susceptible on occasion, like fear, but with a very different intensity. Some people cannot look down at the ground from a distance of a few meters without suffering it. Others climb up on scaffolding, or go to plant flags on the spires of cathedral, with perfect tranquility. The mere thought of such a height terrorized him. For a long time he had conjectured, with laudable modesty, that this infirmity was no more than a sign of an inaptitude for sublime ideas. His general dispositions were strongly down-to-earth. But he reflected one day that a slater working on a church steeple might have low ideas. Such reasoning reassured him. For him, it was an unmerited torture to lean out of a window. Just as one experiences an imperious desire to scratch an itchy wound, he leaned over, breathlessly, clinging to the railings, defying the formidable summons—without, however, ever forgetting, even once, mechanically to verify the solidity of the balcony of any apartment whatsoever. The idea haunted him, if he chanced to sleep in an upstairs apartment, of waking up after a fit of somnambulism—no matter how improbable—lying in the street with his skull fractured, just conscious enough to know that he was doomed.
Curiously enough, that anxiety never tormented him in dreams. The association of ideas takes place mechanically there, without the control of reason. One skims over impressions, in perpetual flux. That vagabondage explains why the preoccupations of the day do not necessarily return during the night. The mind is weary of them, and does not persist. This is so true that it is sometimes sufficient, to expel a redoubtable image from slumber, to think about it before going to sleep. One might even suppose that the sensations which present themselves are complementary to those of the day. In the same way, when one studies a red disk for some time, it is a green circle that one sees when one closes one’s eyes. Heavy people sometimes dream that they have wings. Tiburce’s imagination, weary of vertigo, found an opposite torture in the nocturnal shadows. His nightmares involved believing himself to be buried alive in a grave. He was familiar with the futile effort of trying to lift a stone solidly positioned by a gravedigger’s hands, and the terror of picturing the blue sky, the open air and birds singing to the Sun, from which one is separated for all eternity by the heavy black Earth. But space only tormented him in his hours of lucidity.
His everyday ideas reflected this preoccupation. The influence such visions had on his judgments and actions cannot be overestimated. A particular dread, which one cannot admit for fear of ridicule, can sometimes turn our existence in a definitive direction. Every one of us has one of these insignificant traits, of great importance to him alone, in his character. Tiburce did not hate traveling, but he usually stuck to the seaside. Mountains overwhelmed him with their mass if he stayed at their feet, and, on the other hand, he obviously dreaded climbing their slopes, with his procession of phantoms, even to inscribe his name, with patriotic pride, at the summit of Gauri Sankar.13 He would never go up in a balloon or an aeroplane. What madness to launch oneself on the conquest of the air! Humans are made to live on the ground and maintain the contact that gives them strength, like Antaeus. They will never be the equal of the birds, any more than deep-sea divers or transitory scuba-divers are really fish.
Literature and art furnish fuel for similar opinions. The Tarpeian Rock and the gulf into which the Spartans threw deformed infants were celebrated in his memory. He hung breathlessly with the archpriest14 from the tower of Notre Dame, and saw the convulsed visage, the fingernails scraping the stone, the feet of the cadaver-to-be pulled down by an invisible and implacable force.
Is it not permissible to suppose, however, that a fall from a great height ought not to have the tragic horror that one apprehends therein? Everything that is exaggerated thins out or fades away. In all mortal things there is a semblance of death, which is only a shadow. Have not travelers, returned from some accident on a mountainside, recounted that they experienced an indefinable voluptuousness in feeling themselves floating in space? There is surely a mysterious appeal in the attraction that is the source of vertigo.
At any rate, that manner of dying has something seductive about it, as well as the familiar horror. There is a grandiosity in launching oneself majestically into eternity. The emperor Heliogabalus, a priest of the Sun, had a tower constructed with a base paved with precious stones, for the purpose of a pompous suicide. This supposes, in that Caesar, a conception of life and death that was scarcely banal, which ought to elevate him to the rank of hero. Everyone knows how an artless soldiery prevented him from realizing his dream by massacring him ignominiously, but one can imagine that the gems and enamels, cleverly arranged in a mosaic, might have depicted in advance the traces of actual blood with which they were to be splattered.
It is the most elegant death, the prompt return to the earth from which humans have emerged. But the moderns have forsaken the ancient gesture. Tradition has done away with it. Such forgetfulness can only be explained by the ever-increasing ignorance of propriety and natural law. No one knows any longer how to make an exit. Suicides from the tops of towers displease the people down below. Scarcely once a year does some unfortunate conservationist leap from the top of the Arc de Triomphe—and the purity of the act is always spoiled by some sort of patriotic memory. Provincial notaries climb the steps thinking about Napoleon and salute their last sunrise like that of Waterloo. All men of taste experience embarrassment in the face of that circumstance—a slight but painful sense of the ridiculous.
For it is necessary not to profane rites. The fear of the abyss, and the fatal desire to fall into it, surely have a profound origin. The law of attraction governs the entire realm of matter. The corresponding phenomenon in the spiritual world is love. It is the most mysterious and the most universal of all laws.
The same reasoning lends an appearance of justice to the custom of burying the dead. The pyre is only a simulacrum. Smoke does not escape gravity. Barbaric and deprived of logic are the tribes in which cadavers are exposed in the branches of trees or near the nests of vultures. It is true that in future the branches will be transformed into humus and that the vultures will cherish the ditch after their death, but burial respects the return more promptly, and allows readier comprehension of the unimportance of the individual. Humans return to the earth, as the waves, having briefly surged forth, fall back into the oceans. And the whole is Nirvana.
After a day of wandering metaphysical pathways, Tiburce went to bed, with the hope of following his visions o the extreme. Besides, it was only in sleep that he felt that he was in full possession of his imaginative faculty. Night is favorable to the appearance of astral forms, the advent of messengers send by the Beyond. It would also favor the blooming of unusual flowers. Certain of seeing interesting things, he enveloped his head in the white woolen fabric propitious to evocations.
Jupiter’s priests wore woolen bonnets
, subsequently reduced a plume of the same substance, which no longer had a symbolic meaning, although people symbolically put their cloaks over their heads to devote themselves to meditation. Jupiter’s priests conserved the sacred fire in his house. Tiburce knew that the sacred fire was shielded by a veil, and that thought, too, is a fragile flame that needs to be protected, and prevented from dispersal by any wind. Besides, the most recent scientific discoveries permit the brain to be seen as a real source of energy, which is manifest externally, in certain conditions, in phenomena of light and heat.
He had a dream.
In the aftermath of some fall, or some departure from life, his soul and body found themselves in the inferior land—which is to say, the caverns that the vulgar populate with gnomes, guardians of subterranean treasures. It might be that the heavens—or, at least, what we mean by that name, the goal of our aspirations—are, in reality, below us. That hypothesis would favor the adoration of fire, since the nearest fire, that which might naturally be our guide toward the distant, is situated by geologists in the center of our globe, of which it is the heart. One might also consider successive humankinds, living one on top of one another, becoming more perfect as they occupy inner circles, in an opposite fashion of Dante’s Inferno, the diminution of the spheres as they approach the material annihilation of the nucleus being no obstacle to their existence. One admits that it is at the summit—the place where the lines vanish—that a pyramid, for example, has its full reality.
The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait Page 5